(rdnewsNOW file photo)

By Sheldon Spackman

14 In The Queue

NDP sounds the alarm on ambulance backlog at Red Deer Regional Hospital Centre

Apr 27, 2022 | 8:54 PM

Fourteen ambulances with emergency patients were backlogged in the Red Deer Regional Hospital Centre parking lot on April 25, waiting to access the emergency department.

“The UCP’s damage to care is so severe that instead of accessing a hospital, patients are being cared for in a parking lot,” said David Shepherd, NDP critic for Health, in a press release Wednesday. “The province is experiencing an emergency in ambulance wait times right now and having 14 ambulances wait in a hospital parking lot takes them away from responding to other urgent calls.

“I can’t imagine how the patient and EMS crew in that 14th ambulance must have felt as they sat queued up behind 13 others, waiting to get to the emergency room.”

The NDP says Red Deer hospital is facing added pressure because of hospital closures across central Alberta. The Opposition says the communities of Rimbey, Rocky Mountain House, Sundre, Three Hills, and Hanna are all experiencing bed closures and service reductions in their hospitals due to UCP-driven staff shortages.

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The party also claims doctors are leaving the province at record rates and medical student residency positions in Alberta are going unfilled across the province.

“I have been speaking directly with frontline healthcare professionals in Red Deer who are feeling burnt out and neglected and abandoned by this UCP government,” said Shepherd. “The UCP’s hostility is driving health workers out of the province which is leading to the hospital closures, surgery cancellations, long ambulance wait times, and parking lot medicine that central Alberta is experiencing.”

“Red Deer Regional Hospital Centre (RDRHC) has experienced a surge in demand in recent days due to high volumes of seriously ill patients, a rise in COVID-19 cases requiring hospitalization, and staff absences,” explained Heather Kipling, Communications Directcor-Central Zone, Alberta Health Services. “This demand is having an impact on patient movement within the facility, including through the Emergency Department (ED). Further, there are two inpatient units on COVID-19 outbreaks, one of which was closed to new admissions until today (April 27) which further impacted the availability of beds earlier in the week.”

Kipling says the site has activated overcapacity protocols to help address patient flow.

“Efforts include transferring existing inpatients who can safely have their care needs met elsewhere to rural sites, and discharging patients home or to community settings where it is safe to do so to create capacity for those in need of the specialized care RDRHC provides,” added Kipling. “The site has also postponed a small number of elective surgeries in order to help accommodate the increase in emergency surgical cases.”

As the only regional referral site in the Central Zone, Kipling says it is not unusual for ambulances from other areas to be seen at the hospital, either bringing a patient in for emergency care or to support an inter-facility transfer.

“In recent days there have been times when we have had more ambulances on site than usual due to the high volumes of seriously ill patients and ongoing efforts to transfer patients back to other facilities,” continued Kipling. “We continue to work diligently to get EMS crews back on the road as quickly as possible to avoid lengthy wait times for crews. We know that working in times of overcapacity can be stressful and tiring for our staff and we are tremendously grateful for their unwavering dedication to patients during these times.”

Dr. Mike Weldon, Emergency Physician at Red Deer Regional Hospital Centre (RDRHC), describes Monday’s circumstances as a long-term and ongoing shortage of hospital capacity.

“This is the worst that it’s been,” admits Weldon. “Effectively what happens is, when all of the beds in the hospital are full, people who are in emergency that get admitted to hospital end up taking a bed in the Emergency Department and then what happened on Monday night, is that all of those beds got full with people who are admitted, leaving nowhere to see new, arriving emergency patients, except in the waiting room and consequently backing up the ambulances that were there to drop people off.”

Dr. Weldon says there are two things to make note of from Monday night’s circumstances.

“We saw a massive backlog of ambulances, and then we saw basically nowhere to see patients, except in the waiting room,” says Weldon. “It’s just so difficult for the healthcare provider to have to provide care in such a difficult environment that’s lacking privacy and proper equipment and space to do our job.”

Weldon says it’s a situation that’s happened before and will certainly happen again.

“It happened pre-pandemic on a fairly regular basis but never as bad as it’s been on Monday,” he points out. “There’s no clear path to increasing capacity at the hospital, so until we get more space and more staff, this type of issue will continue to happen and the public needs to be aware of that, that wait times are going to get very long at times and we may be providing care in non-standard places, including the waiting room.”

Dr. Keith Wolstenholme, Chief of Orthopaedic Surgery, Red Deer Regional Hospital, says the circumstances on April 25 were not surprising.

“This is what happens when you get bed lock, where if your hospital bed is upstairs or full, then there’s nowhere for emergency patients to go up to,” he explains. “And if there’s nowhere for the emergency patients to go to, then the patients waiting to be seen, have no emergency stretchers to go to.”

Wolstenholme says it boils down to two things: hospital capacity and human resources.

“We need a plan for human resources and we need a plan for how we’re going to get from here to 2030,” he exclaims. “Human resources is a huge crunch right now. Physicians of various specialties, nurses, respiratory therapists, clinical assistants, we are just up against it in all directions.”

He wonders how all of these concerns are going to be fixed.

“Are we increasing our enrolment in nursing schools? Are we increasing how much we’re recruiting out of province, out of country? Are we making Alberta a more desireable and palatable place for healthcare workers to move to?” he asks. “I just don’t see any evidence of a plan. Speaking as a physician, we haven’t had a contract for two years and that is a huge negative factor when trying to recruit a physician to come to this province.”

“We’re just so short of people,” laments Wolstenholme. “People are burned out, people are leaving the profession in droves and it just seems like if somebody has a plan, they haven’t shared it, that’s for sure.”